Please provide an overview of your product and services offerings. 

KnoahSoft’s Harmony is a web-based suite of tightly integrated call recording and agent quality management tools designed to enhance and improve contact center operations and performance. It includes modules for quality monitoring, scorecarding, real time call monitoring, coaching, elearning, reporting and speech analytics.  In addition to the breadth of functionality:

• Harmony is easy to implement, maintain, and manage
• Harmony can be deployed in a variety of diverse models
     o centralized contact centers
     o distributed branches
     o work-at-home agents

Harmony is packaged in three different ways to support various end user needs.
Standard Edition provides the required tools, functionality, and features needed to ensure that agent/customer interactions (including voice and screens) are securely recorded and efficiently archived for future search and playback. Key features include:
• Call recording with screen capture
• Web-based dashboard portal and messaging interface
     o Provides real-time and historic information about recordings
     o Provdes real time messaging alerts that indicate system health and status
• Recording management and archival facilities from a central web-based dashboard.
• Standard reporting
     o includes custom report builder to enable clients to easily extend the basic reporting templates
• Web-based silent monitoring toolset
     o enables real-time passive listening to agent calls with screen capture
Harmony Contact Center Edition delivers a comprehensive set of contact center tools. It expands on the Standard Edition by including Quality Management and Performance Management tools. Key features include:
• A workflow-enabled quality assurance evaluation environment that supports multiple quality forms, inline text and voice comments, calibration management, agent appeals of quality scores, and automated call recording selection/assignment to insure agent coverage.
• Tools that create customizable, role-based, multiple KPI driven scorecards that can use both internal or external metrics within the same scorecard.
• Dashboards that measure agent performance, queues, teams, groups, sites and lines of business supported by the contact center.
Harmony Enterprise Edition delivers all the tools required to improve customer satisfaction and operation awareness. The Enterprise Edition provides customers with all the Contact Center functions and includes Coaching, eLearning and Surveying application modules.
• The Coaching and eLearning modules provide an automated framework for building personalized agent training programs based on quality and performance data from Harmony and other call center applications
• The Survey module enables the creation of IVR and Web-based surveys for inbound and outbound contact centers
   1. Surveys are tied back to the original call recordings for more targeted analysis.

What new offerings can we expect from Knoahsoft in 2010?

KnoahSoft spent considerable development effort in 2009 to improve the scalability of the platform, support the highest security and PCI compliant features in managing recordings, and significantly improve the flexibility of our reporting engine to support plug and play graphical report management.  In 2010, we will continue to invest in state of the art functionality within Harmony, including:
• a broader range of integrated speech analytics tools to supplement quality management, coaching and elearning,
• full support for internationalization of the UI in double byte character sets
• real-time analytics including OLAP support
• strengthened integrations to WFM and eCRM tools.

Your company “plays” in a market with many other competitors. Some of which have substantial R&D and marketing budgets.   How do you differentiate yourselves from your competitors?

Despite our smaller size, we devote over half of our yearly budget to R&D because we believe that long term investments in innovation and flexibility will be the engine that drives our growth.  Larger vendors are often hamstrung in their ability to stay on top of changes in the marketplace due to commitments to complex, legacy applications.  Many of our recent customers have indicated our engineering flexibility in addition to our price and comprehensive offering as a deciding factor in purchasing Harmony as their WFO platform of choice.  Harmony 3.0 is differentiated from other market offerings by the following product capabilities:

--Flexible storage management:  Harmony has the  ability to have call recordings or database files reside in and be centrally accessed from physically different locations or in a SAN or NAS environment within an enterprise..
--Integration Ease – Harmony has the ability to seamlessly merge previous and future data and software applications into an application solution.
--Automatic Archiving-Harmony allows for permanently backing up and storing data without requiring user input.
-- Remotely supportable:  Harmony can be administered and managed through web-based interfaces and desktop sharing technology
--Open reporting:  Users can add to or extend the out of the box reporting templates in Harmony through an easy to use, powerful graphical Report building tool.
--Scalable Call Recording:  Harmony can scale from the smallest to the largest sized environments with a minimum of hardware investment.
--Multi-channel:  Harmony can support quality reviews across multiple communication channels, including Voice, chat, email and back office transactions.
--Redundancy:  Harmony supports redundant failover architectures for deployment to insure maximum uptime across the enterprise for mission critical, full time recording.
--Hosted:  Using Harmony’s multi-tenant features, Knoahsoft can support hosted use of Harmony including managed services of the server environment.

Knoahsoft has a speech analytics offering in addition to your call recording capabilities.   Some performance management vendors contend that these applications are insufficient when analyzing the performance of an agent since desktop analytics and an analysis whole call are also needed.   Please comment.

Certainly speech analytics by itself is not a panacea to agent performance management.  We believe it is critical to use speech analytics in an appropriate way to drive more effective use of traditional quality monitoring by doing a better job of call categorization and sampling.  Then, once the calls are more appropriately sampled, we can use our cradle to grave call segmentation support and screen capture facilities to insure that reviewers have a complete picture of the context of the call so their comments and coaching to agents is appropriate and comprehensive.  This, coupled with our integrated survey and multi-KPI score-carding modules provides the full 360 degree feedback an agent needs.

Knoahsoft has two major offerings for contact centers: the Harmony Contact Center Edition, and the Harmony Enterprise addition.  Please explain the differences.

From a customer requirements perspective we have seen 3 primary types of purchasers:
1. Companies that are just looking for call recording for compliance purposes or to support the foundation of a bare bones quality program.
2. Companies that need call recording and a formal quality monitoring tool with flexible reporting and score carding to rank agents
3. Companies that want a comprehensive suite of tools to help manage all facets of their contact center performance management requirements, including QM, Coaching, Survey, eLearning, Analytics, etc..
From these three profiles we have developed our three primary editions:  Standard, Contact Center and Enterprise.  Of course we have customers that want to mix and match modules beyond the pre-defined packages and so we support a wide range of ala carte additions to the Standard edition to suit those customers.  The beauty of the Harmony architecture is that all the modules are seamlessly integrated into the base interface framework so even a “custom” designed system looks like any of the pre-packaged solutions.

With the growth of social media, companies have another channel to monitor.  Do your offerings have a role in this emerging channel?

One recent Contact Center survey found that 60% of consumers were not confident that a contact center could satisfactorily handle their request. Consumers are looking for a something they trust and are turning to the online community for help. Customer service needs to be a part of this information transfer.
• Customers use online media outlets as a vehicle to share their experiences and discuss services they want or need.
• Customers express their dissatisfaction with products, services and companies in general in a “public” setting.
• If customers are not calling the center, agents do not have the opportunity to up sell or improve their impression of the product/service a customer may already have

Certainly for B to C companies, social media is becoming a huge, new, untamed channel.  We view the interactions that occur in social media to be very similar to direct email or chat interactions in content/style.  We feel that QM can be done on these types of transactions as long as we are able to get at the “transcript” of the interaction whether it is a blog, twitter or forum posting.  We support text based transactions natively in Harmony today and we are working actively with several emerging companies that have developed real-time monitoring tools for social media in a customer service context that will help us aggregate those transactions not only for quality purposes but also to assist in understanding customer satisfaction and design flaws in a product/service.  In many respects, social media’s impact on the contact center may muscle out the long pitched efforts at unified communications coming from the large ACD vendors.  KnoahSoft intends to stay ahead of this trend.

Speech analytics can provide some very valuable customer and marketing data.   How should a company go about analyzing such data?   What is the best way to identify trends?  

Since the typical speech analytics engine is oriented around finding words and phrases in recordings, we believe that analysis should be driven around identifying words and phrases that help us to do the following:

• Categorize calls into product areas:  This will enable us to understand which products/services are generating interest/concern
• Categorize calls into problem areas: This will enable us to understand the challenges our customers are having in using a given product/service
• Determine customer satisfaction:  Are customers ending the call satisfied with the resulting solution or are they expressing dissatisfaction
• Determine individual agent competence:  Are agents following the call process correctly?  Are they upselling and cross selling? Are they struggling to get basic customer information?
• Determine churn or competitive opportunities/risks:  Are customers threatening to return/cancel?  Are they mentioning a specific competing product?

By collecting this information on an ongoing basis in a consistent way and using a comprehensive, flexible reporting engine like what we have in Harmony we can help clients identify the key trends that will enable both the call center and the business as a whole to be more effective.

The recent volatility in the economy has created a great deal of uncertainly for many contact center vendors.   What is Knoahsoft’s outlook for 2010?

KnoahSoft has certainly seen a very vibrant market in India and the Middle East over the past year with a number of large call centers and VOIP deployments from the major ACD vendors that are driving call recording demand.  The US has been tough in 2009 with a general lack of spending on new contact center/telephony projects due to the recession.  However, we have seen a significant upswing in opportunities in the US and Europe that started in Q4 of 2009 and we expect that trend will continue in 2010 as the recession begins to ease and companies begin spending in IT in advance of growth.  KnoahSoft is continuing to make investments in sales and marketing to take advantage of the emerging opportunities in all the markets we are pursuing in 2010.